Texas 12th in pay gap for women

Updated 7:03 pm, Thursday, November 1, 2012

When it comes to the wage gap, Texas women fare better than most places.

The state outranked all but 10 others and the District of Columbia in a recent report examining the wage gap between men and women, the National Women's Law Center said.

Texas' wage gap was 18.2 cents, which is how much less that a full-time working woman made in 2011 for every dollar a man made, the center said in its wage equality survey last week.

Nationally, the gap was 23 cents, an earnings differential that has persisted for the last decade, said Fatima Goss Graves, the center's vice president for education and employment.

She called the gap unfair to women and their families, and suggested Texas should not be pleased with a 12th-place ranking.

"I don't know of any family that would be satisfied with giving away 18 percent of its salary," Graves said. "This should be a real priority for people in Texas and around the country."

No data was available for cities.

Erin Stansell, a project manager for Clark Construction in San Antonio and president of the local chapter of the National Association of Women in Construction, said women can get the same pay as men in construction but have to work harder to establish credibility.

Some companies pay women more comparably to men than others, and pay equity is getting better overall, she said.

The Women's Law Center's salary estimates were drawn from U.S. Census surveys and showed that women earned less than men in every state.

The narrowest spread - 9.6 cents for each dollar paid to a man - was in D.C., while Utah, Louisiana and Wyoming ranked at the bottom with gaps of 31 cents and more.

Graves said the disparity does not go away for specific jobs or for factors like how long job seekers have been out of school.

While the gap has fallen by about 18 cents over the last 50 years, for the last decade it has stayed constant, she said.